Eight theories of religion second edition

It should be clear from all of this that to the scholar inquiring about the symbolism of the sacred, the human historical record is of key importance. It shows us how different people have recognized the sacred through, say, a holy mountain in China or a holy river like the Ganges in India. Archaic believers themselves, however, find their situation in history to be quite another matter. For them, the events of ordinary profane life, the daily round of labor and struggle, are things they desperately wish to escape. They would rather be out of history and in the perfect realm of the sacred. Eliade’s term for this desire, as we noted earlier, is the “nostalgia for Paradise.” It is a concept central to his theory. Though he refers to it in many places, he explains it best in the third of the three texts we have taken as our guides. This is The Myth of the Eternal Return: Or, Cosmos and History, which he first published along with Patterns in 1949.

Eliade considered this book one of his most significant, and even his critics have tended to agree. In it, he sets out a strong thesis: that the one theme which dominates the thought of all archaic peoples is the drive to abolish history—all of history—and return to that point beyond time when the world began. The desire to go back to beginnings, he argues, is the deepest longing, the most insistent and heartfelt ache in the soul of all archaic peoples. A constant theme of archaic ritual and myth is the wish “to live in the world as it came from the Creator’s hands, fresh, pure, and strong.”²⁴ This is why, as we

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Eliade thinks it important to notice the motives that inspire this myth of return. He explains that archaic peoples, like all others, are deeply affected not only by the mysteries of suffering and death but also by concerns about living without any purpose or meaning. They long for significance, permanence, beauty, and perfection as well as escape from their sorrows. Life’s minor irritations and inconveniences are not the problem; they can be borne by anyone. But the idea that the human adventure as a whole might be merely a pointless exercise, an empty spectacle with death as its end—that is a prospect no archaic people can endure. Eliade calls this experience “the terror of history,” and it explains why people have been drawn so powerfully to myth, especially the myth of eternal return. Because ordinary life is not significant, because real meaning can never be found within history, archaic peoples choose instead to take their stand outside of it. In the face of life’s drab, empty routine and daily irritations, they seek to overcome all in a defiant gesture of denial; through symbol and myth, they reach back to the world’s primal state of perfection, to a moment when life starts over from its origin, full of promise and hope. “The primitive, by conferring a cyclic direction upon time, annuls its irreversibility. Everything begins over again at its commencement every instant.”²⁷

This “terror of history” has been felt not only by archaic peoples but also by the great civilizations of the ancient world, where a cyclical view of time was predominant. In India, for example, the oldest teachings held that human beings were destined to live without hope in a world that passed through immense cycles of decay and decline until it was finally destroyed and again remade. The reaction to this deeply pessimistic view eventually came in the form of the classic Eastern version of eternal return—the doctrine of rebirth,

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Almost everywhere in archaic and civilized ancient cultures, then, the problem of history was central, and the solution, the escape, was found in some form of the myth of eternal return. The pattern is so widespread, says Eliade, that only in one place—among the Hebrews of ancient Palestine—can something different be found. It is in ancient Israel that, for the first time on the world scene, a new religious outlook makes its appearance. While not entirely rejecting the idea of a mythical return to beginnings, Judaism proclaims that the sacred can be found in history as well as outside of it. With this, the whole equation of archaic religion is significantly altered. In Judaism, and later in Christianity, which derives from it, the idea of the pointless cycles of nature is pushed into the background, while human events come to center stage, where they take shape along the line of a meaningful story—a history—with the sacred, in the form of the God of Israel, a participant in its scenes. In place of endless, purposeless world cycles, Judaism asserts a meaningful sequence of sacred historical events. This striking innovation was fashioned chiefly by the great prophets of Israel—Amos, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and others. When disasters fell on their people, they presented these troubles not as miseries to be escaped but as punishments to be endured—in history—because they came from the

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very hand of God. In their oracles and speeches, says Eliade, the prophets affirmed the idea

That the encounter of a people with this personal God of history is something quite new can be seen also from the famous biblical story of the patriarch Abraham, who prepares to kill his son as an offering to God. If Judaism were an archaic religion, says Eliade, this fearsome act would be an instance of human sacrifice, a killing of the firstborn to renew the sacred power of life in the gods. Within Judaism, however, the event has a quite different character. Abraham’s encounter is a very personal transaction in history with a God who asks him for his son simply as a sign of his faith. This God does not need sacrifices to renew his divine powers (and indeed he does spare Isaac, the son), but what he does require from his people is a heart loyal enough to make that ultimate sacrifice if asked. Christianity inherits this same perspective. The sequence of events that make up the life and death of Jesus forms a singular and historic instance, a decisive moment which, occurring once only, serves as the basis for a personal relationship of forgiveness and trust between Christian believers and their God. In celebrating the life, crucifixion, and resurrection of Christ, the Christian faithful do not engage in a ritual of seasonal rebirth; they do not act out an eternal return to beginnings. They remember a specific and final historical event, one that requires from them an equally singular and final decision of personal faith.

Of course, this new historical religion did not win an instant victory over the older, archaic attitudes, which are deeply rooted in human psychology. The tremendous attraction that fertility religions like the cult of Baal had for ordinary people in ancient Israel is proof of this in the case of Judaism. In Christian cultures also, archaic seasonal ceremonies of rebirth do survive and blend in with the more purely historical elements. And both traditions have been routinely susceptible to messianic movements. These passionate groups, which expect a return of God’s chosen one, a catastrophe at the world’s end, and the coming of a perfect world, bear again the marks of the archaic mind; they tolerate history, but only because they believe “that, one day or another, it will cease.”²⁹ In consequence, both sides of the Judeo-Christian tradition

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The Judeo-Christian turn to historical religion is for Eliade an event of momentous importance. It marks the beginning of a shift away from archaic attitudes, a first revolt against the myth of eternal return. Yet it is not the world’s only great religious transformation. A second revolution, one of equal or even greater proportions, has only recently begun to take shape in the very center of Western civilization, especially modern Europe and America. Over the last few centuries, Eliade explains, we have once again seen something quite new in human history: the wide acceptance of philosophies that deny the existence and value of the sacred altogether. Advocates of these views claim that it makes no difference where we locate the sacred, whether in history or beyond it, for the simple reason that human beings do not need it. The truth, they say, is that there are no gods, there are no “sacred archetypes” which can show us how to live or what ultimate purpose to live for. We must learn to live without the sacred altogether. There is no such thing.

We can put aside for a moment the question of whether this modern, totally unsacred view of the world is good or bad. Eliade’s first concern is to show where it came from. He thinks, interestingly, that the door to this second revolution was in fact opened by the very same shift of ideas that created the first: the coming of Judeo-Christian historical religion. This seems puzzling at first sight, but for Eliade the sequence is clear. It comes into focus the moment we place everything within the original context of archaic religion and the myth of eternal return. We must remember that to the first archaic peoples, the world of nature was of pivotal importance. It was able at any instant to come alive with the sacred. Symbolism clothed it in the supernatural; legend and myth sang of the gods behind the storm and rain. Clues and hints of the sacred could be found in a tree, a stone, or the path of a bird in flight. Nature was the garment of the divine. This was not to be the case, however, in Judaism and Christianity. The prophets of Israel and writers of the New Testament pushed nature into the background and brought history up to the front of the stage. The seasons, storms, and trees were “desacralized,” for the God of Israel and of Christian faith chose to reveal himself chiefly in the twists and turns of dramatic human events—in the Hebrews’ escape from Egypt, in the battle of Jericho, or in the birth, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. To be sure, nature still had a part to play, but only in a supporting role. Israel’s prophets still saw the great wind that parted the Red Sea as a sign of the sacred, but—in the light of their historical perspective—they read it quite differently. For them

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As Eliade sees it, this change of religious sensibility is a significant one, not only on its own terms, but because of the momentous consequences that follow from it. For gradually, and almost imperceptibly, this original move from religions of nature to religions of history laid the groundwork in the present era for a further shift—from the newer religions of history to philosophies of history and society that discard religion altogether. Through the long passage of centuries, and especially in Western civilization, the removal of the divine from nature has slowly opened the way for entire societies to adopt a style of thought that only a few isolated individuals ever seriously considered until the coming of the modern era. That style is secularity: the removal of all reference to the sacred from human thought and action. Eliade explains that in stating the logic behind their move entirely away from religion, secular thinkers can argue as follows: If biblical religions like Judaism and Christianity made one great change in the world’s religious consciousness, does that not license us to make another if we should so wish? If the prophets felt they had a right to take the sacred out of nature and find it only in history, why can we not follow their own example and dismiss it from nature and history alike? There is, in short, nothing indispensable about the idea of the sacred. For Eliade, this is the form of reasoning at work in nearly all of the secular, nonreligious philosophies that have come upon the world with such powerful appeal during the last three centuries of modern times. We might call them the unwelcome stepchildren of Judaism and Christianity.

Eliade describes these secular creeds as forms of “historicism,” a type of thought that recognizes only things ordinary and profane while denying any reference at all to things supernatural and sacred. Historicists hold that if we want significance, if we want some sense of a larger purpose in life, we obviously cannot find it in the archaic way—by escaping history through some doctrine of eternal return. But neither can we find it in the Judeo-Christian way—by claiming that there is in history some great plan or purpose of God. We can find it only in ourselves.

Examples of this historicist thinking can be found in any number of modern systems and thinkers, among them several we have already met in our chapters. Eliade notes the developmentalism of the German philosopher Hegel, the communism of Karl Marx, and the perspectives of twentiethcentury fascism and existentialism. Modern capitalism might be included as well. What all of these systems share is the fundamental belief that if human beings want meaning and significance in their lives, they must create it entirely on their own—in the profane realm of history and without assistance

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from ideas about the sacred. This can be done in different ways, of course. Fascists and Marxists believe that even without gods or the sacred, history is still “going somewhere.” It will end in the triumph of a nation or race or in the victory of the proletariat. Existentialists tend to think that history as a whole has no central purpose; it is “going nowhere,” so only the private lives and choices of individuals matter. The capitalist entrepreneur may make a similar choice by finding purpose only in money and other material goods. For such people, only personal freedom or achievement matters, and they can even argue that they are better off than archaic peoples, who do not have freedom because their lives must always conform to patterns provided by the gods.

Despite his misgivings, Eliade does not carry on an extended argument with these modern philosophies. He merely voices his doubts as to whether they can ever be truly satisfying to the human personality. And he tries, by contrast, to show how, in hidden ways, archaic thinking has persisted right up to the present day. He notes, for example, that creative artists like T. S. Eliot and James Joyce display in their works a remarkable attachment to forms of the myth of eternal return. Athletic events, the great public spectacles of our time, show similar affinities; they generate intense emotions and center on a single “concentrated” game time, very much like the sacred moments of primitive ritual. The dramas of theater, television, and film play out life in a compressed interval of “sacred” time that is wholly different from normal hours and days. The images and stories of popular culture resemble archaic myths, creating character archetypes on which ordinary people pattern their lives: “the political or the military hero, the hapless lover; or the cynic, the nihilist, the melancholy poet.” These and others play for us the same roles filled for archaic

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people by the heroes and gods of myth. Even the modern habit of reading can be seen as a replacement for the oral traditions remembered and recited by primitive peoples; it mirrors the archaic desire to create an “escape time,” free from the pressures of daily life.

It is worth noticing that this cosmic Christianity with which Eliade concludes The Eternal Return bears a marked resemblance to the peasant religion he found so strongly appealing when he first encountered it in the villages of India as a young man. He is always careful not to make any open endorsements, but it seems clear that in the end his own strong sympathies lie nearest to this sort of cosmic folk religion and the satisfactions offered by the archaic frame of mind.

Eliade pursues a program of inquiry that dissents, more sharply than that of Weber, from the functionalist reductionism of Freud, Durkheim, and Marx. At the same time, his interest in comparisons on a global scale and his commitment to explaining religion “on its own terms” recall the intellectualist perspective of the Victorian anthropologists Tylor and Frazer. Three of the elements in this theoretical agenda call for more particular comment.

From the outset Eliade announces his strong dissent from the reductionist approaches favored in his day and still attractive in ours. In opposition to Freud,

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Durkheim, and Marx, he strongly asserts the independence of religious ideas and activities. Like Weber, he accepts that psychology, society, economics, and other forces have their effects on religion, but he refuses to see their influence as determining or even dominant. Religion, he insists, can be understood only if we try to see it from the standpoint of the believer. Like Roman law, which we can grasp only through Roman values, or Egyptian architecture, which we must see through Egyptian eyes, religious behaviors, ideas, and institutions must be seen in the light of the religious perspective, the view of the sacred, that inspires them. In the case of archaic peoples especially, clearly it is not profane life—social, economic, or otherwise—that controls the sacred; it is the sacred that controls and shapes every aspect of the profane.

Another main feature of Eliade’s theory is its broad and ambitious design. He is of course not the only theorist to try to assemble data from a wide variety of sources, places, and times, but he is certainly more ambitious in this regard than most. He takes very seriously his double mission to be both a good historian and a good phenomenologist, and he strives for a genuinely comprehensive understanding of religion in all its forms. The research that lies behind his analyses is far reaching in extent, The three central texts on which we have focused here represent just a part of his labors, which include not only his several books on Indian yoga but studies as well of Australian religions, European folk traditions, and Asian shamans, or prophet-mystics. Other works focus on alchemy, initiation rituals, and witchcraft; on dreams, myths, and the occult; on symbolism in the arts; on methods of studying religion, and on a variety of other related topics. Even in retirement, he continued to work on a full-scale History of Religious Ideas, which was almost complete at his death. This wideranging global interest has won Eliade admirers, especially among some of his students in America. Skeptical critics, on the other hand, wonder whether the problem is that it is far too global, and perhaps therefore superficial. In tones that hardly suggest a compliment, some see his approach as “Frazerian,” as a retreat to the doubtful aims and methods of The Golden Bough.³⁰